Trump Campaign’s Cambridge Analytica List Use Examined

The Cambridge Analytica logo is displayed in front of a Facebook screen in Portland, Ore., on March 21, 2018. Cambridge Analytica reportedly harvested data from 50 million Facebook profiles to target voters in America ahead of President Donald Trump's victory in 2016. (Photo by Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

An digital-marketing consultant has found a trove of digital data from Donald Trump’s social-media campaign that gives the first real evidence his presidential campaign made steady utilization of gathering of audience lists made by Cambridge Analytica to focus on a part of its “dark ads” on Facebook, The Daily Beast reported Monday.

The role played by Cambridge Analytica, a British digital black-ops firm that collapsed this year, has taken on added importance following scandalous revelations it bought and used detailed Facebook profile data on 87 million people without their knowledge.

Following the privacy scandal, Trump tried to distance the campaign from Cambridge Analytica, but that connection has been a subject of probes by both special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee, especially since it was seen as an important factor in Trump winning the presidency.

At issue are the “dark ads” that spurred Trump’s 2016 social-media campaign. At the time of the campaign, advertisers could use Facebook’s precision-targeting tools to have ads that evaded broader scrutiny, because only the targets could ever see them.

Digital marketer Emily Las has spent the last year extracting remnants of Trump’s Facebook campaign and has so far unearthed more than 1,200 tracking links for different Trump ads, and live content for hundreds of them.

Through this meticulous work, Las has developed a more complete understanding than what was previously possible of some aspects of Trump’s Facebook campaign, details such as which technology partners he used at various times in the campaign, and what the intended purpose of each ad was.